This is a landmark album from a highly significant rock band. A Night at the Opera certainly qualifies as Queen’s equivalent of Led Zeppelin IV or Sergeant Pepper. More than that, this DVD release features a 5.1 remix that brings new life to a rock classic.

Queen was well-known at the time of this album’s debut for hard rock. The band’s third release, Sheer Heart Attack, had proved that they could push the limits of the genre and gain international success. But I doubt that many believed that Queen could blow those limits away so completely as they do in A Night At The Opera. The music ranges from pop ("You’re My Best Friend") to heavy metal ("Death On Two Legs," etc.) to ballad to sprightly singalong to multi-layered instrumental ("God Save The Queen," would you believe), and the lyrics go everywhere from fantasy ("Prophet Song") and sci-fi ("’39" is one of only two songs I can think of that deals with the effects of time dilation during near-light-speed travel) to heartbreak. There are campy seaside songs ("Lazing On A Sunday Afternoon," "Seaside Rendezvous," "Good Company") placed schizophrenically (sometimes without a pause) up against earnest hard rock numbers – and then there are tracks that combine many of these elements, like "Bohemian Rhapsody," all tied together with a multi-layering of guitars and vocals that is almost unique in the genre. The only two players I can think of who come close in the multi-layer guitar stakes are Ollie Halsall and Martin Briley, and neither of the best examples of their work in this area were ever released.

A Night at the Opera works, I suspect, because nobody in the band takes
anything too seriously. Some of the numbers are certainly
tongue-in-cheek, but even in the more "significant" cuts, there is a
lightness without which this album would have been very heavy going.
The 5.1 mix successfully picks up that lack of seriousness, but perhaps
takes it a little too far.

24-track, two-inch recorders were fairly common in British studios by
1975, and this album was recorded in major facilities all over the
country. Those tracks are needed, too. The multi-layered guitar
arrangements which characterize this album, along with
similarly-layered vocals, would have been extremely difficult to
achieve only a couple of years earlier without serious loss of balance
control and increased noise levels due to 16-track track-bouncing.

The masters ended up in the tape store at Abbey Road, where they were
recovered last year and transferred to 24-bit, 96 kHz sampling digital
audio on Steinberg’s powerful new Nuendo digital audio workstation, the
up-and-coming choice for engineers and producers working at high sample
rates, endorsed by heavyweights like Alan Parsons. The results so
impressed Abbey Road’s engineers that other Queen material is likely to
be transferred the same way.

The discs were then brought over to California and mixed by Elliot
Scheiner at the Dog House in West Los Angeles and Capitol Records in
Hollywood. Roy Thomas Baker, who produced the original mix with the
band, also produced the 5.1 remix and was involved in the whole
process. This pairing of the virtuoso surround remix engineer and the
original producer no doubt accounts for the impressive, if
idiosyncratic, translation of this classic album into surround.

It’s easy to hear why Nuendo is becoming so popular in modern studios
when you listen to this surround mix. 24-track in the early days gave
you more tracks, but at the expense of higher noise and loss of audio
quality. Those factors are completely overcome here: quiet passages are
extremely clean and noise-free and the top end is pristine, while the
bass is powerful and present. There are a couple of inevitable
weirdnesses, like piano pedal thumps in one case that one would have
thought could be EQ’d out, the odd edit that was evidently on the
multi-tracks and shows its true nature rather more clearly in digital
surround than it did in analog stereo, and occasional accidental
over-use of noise removal algorithms resulting in lower noise at the
expense of some detail. (This last may be imaginary, by the way: noise
could well have added an apparent smoothness that really wasn’t there.)
Overall, however, it’s an excellent-sounding remix of a classic album.

There are wonderful opportunities in the material here to be exploited
in surround, and not one is missed. Vocal and guitar parts appear from
all around the surround soundstage. Solos pan from one speaker to
another. Effects pop out of nowhere. It’s a pyrotechnic display that
would be well over the top on other material, but here is almost
entirely appropriate.

It must be said, though, that some of the smoothness and coherence of
the original stereo mix (which is also presented on this disc at 24/96)
is lost, from time to time, in an apparent desire to make the surround
mix as impressive as possible. The surrounds are also distractingly
loud in places.

I have seen one early review that thoroughly panned the surround mixing
on this album as both lacking audio quality and taking too many
liberties with the material, in terms of gratuitous panning, etc. I
would not go so far. While I would acknowledge that this mix is over
the top in some ways, the album as a whole is not what you could call
conceptually understated – it too is over the top – and I really don’t
mind. We already have the original stereo mix, after all. I would
certainly not criticize the overall sound quality a great deal: it’s
almost as if the earlier reviewer was listening to a different disc –
which could well be the case, as this album was originally scheduled
for release last year and was then held back for several months,
perhaps due to some unknown technical problems.

The disc itself is playable on both DVD-Audio and regular DVD-Video
machines. The MLP track on the DVD-A area is the best, of course, but
DVD-V owners can enjoy the latest DTS encoding technology that
theoretically offers 24/96 capability at a level of quality that is
superior to "standard" DTS and is also backwards compatible if you
don’t have the latest decoder. I don’t have the latest decoder, so I
can’t tell you how much of an improvement the new DTS offers. There is
also the original stereo mix presented in a new 24/96 transfer from
analog, where it does rather show its age in terms of noise level, due
to an additional analog tape master stage, while still sounding overall
better than the previous CD versions. Additionally, there are full
lyrics (nicely laid out to be readable even on small screens), credits,
a photo gallery of contemporary band photos and a clean, well-designed
menu structure. There’s also a comprehensive booklet. The people behind
the actual physical production of a DVD don’t often get mentioned in
reviews, but I would like here to congratulate Jeff Levison at DTS for
an exceptional job of putting all this together.

This important release brings this classic album right up to date, and
although one song doesn’t quite hold its own, lyrically, into the 21st
Century (the eight-minute prog-rock "Prophet Song," I’m afraid, though
it is musically more significant than the other tracks that are far
more clearly recalled), almost everything else is timeless and even
more enjoyable in its new 5.1 incarnation than when it first came out.

Despite the fact that some may feel the production team were having a
little too much fun in the control room while they were mixing this
record, I would label Queen’s A Night at the Opera a "must-have." Turn
it up loud and enjoy.

A word about sound-quality ratings

Some readers (primarily manufacturers, interestingly) have asked how I
arrive at the ratings I give in my reviews, and I would like to clarify
a few points. When it comes to sound quality, I give a rating out of
ten that bears in mind the limitations of the technology used for the
release, NOT an "absolute sound quality" rating. This means that, for
example, what I consider to be a brilliant DTS CD could get a higher
sound quality rating than a mediocre DVD-Audio release.

I also consider the source material. If you are creating a 5.1 remix of
something that was originally recorded on a pair of four-track machines
in 1967, you are likely to have a hard job making enough of it to sound
good in surround, although it can be done. If someone succeeds at this
difficult task, I will usually say so in the text as well as rewarding
the effort with points.

Sometimes, however, it’s too much to ask: attempts are made to remix
things into surround that were only ever designed for mono, and the
effect can be quite horrible – like the old "mono reprocessed for
stereo" releases that sounded worse than the original. I will again
mention this in the text if necessary, and I will mark DOWN the sound
quality if I think it’s something that, quite frankly, shouldn’t have
been attempted.

I tend not to give a "10" for anything because one of these days I’ll
come across something so utterly stunning that I’ll need a number
higher than anything I’ve given before (though I suppose, like Spinal
Tap, I could go up to 11). I also tend to review things I like before
things I don’t like. There is only a certain amount of space in the
magazine and I would rather fill my part of it talking about stuff I
enjoy rather than warning you about stuff to avoid – unless it’s really
being hyped and you ought to be told.